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RE: Impressive ideas from Craig Wright, Bitcoin is Turing complete
Agreeing with him makes sense only if you are a miner and mining fees is your business. If you are in Bitcoin for "sound money" than none of it makes any sense even in theory. And letting miners set the rules is just disastrous idea.
Did you watch the video? What about the theory didn't make sense? Not talking about his political interests.
I was watching it live. And man, it was a disaster! His whole speech was about "how to centralize Bitcoin" and "how to present it to the public so it doesn't appear so". Except the part where he told everyone who couldn't afford the expensive hardware that is needed for his plan to fuck off. Didn't really hide it there.
You have a deep misunderstanding. The source of decentralization in Bitcoin is the market (economic incentive structure) not the devices. If you cannot afford expensive hardware then let that go because the people who can afford expensive hardware will mine. People with the most money will always have the best hardware from which to mine. Mining is always for "rich people" who can afford to burn money to support the security of the network.
If you are worried about centralization around hash power then that ultimately happens no matter what strategy you use if it's Proof of Work. You could let everyone mine on CPUs and eventually it centralizes around pools and farms, You could let everyone mine on whatever physical devices you want and the fact that it is a physical device is centralizing. Only the economic incentives control how centralized or decentralized it is, in my opinion.
Core in my opinion has the incentives wrong. For instance Craig Wright endorses unlimited forks (decentralizing), larger blocks (which could lead to a higher price as a side effect), if Bitcoin becomes more valuable (again economics) then the cost of hardware isn't an issue unless you want every user to also be a miner which doesn't make any sense or have any impact on security that I can see.
If every user is a miner or not, the security in my opinion isn't going to scale based on how many individual persons are mining with their smart watches. Diminishing returns in my opinion there, but hey I could be wrong.
Tell me why I'm wrong?
There is no right or wrong, just different outcomes. Why do you want mining to become centralized?
I don't want it to be centralized to the point where a single mining pool or even single mining farm holds more than 50% of the hash power. Why should I trust these companies to scale the Bitcoin when they can reach consensus without my vote or without anyone's to that matter. They came to be because mining Bitcoin was profitable. You think that makes them competent enough to give control to them?
My point is mining is always centralized. It's centralized around the physical devices, which means the physical device manufacturers. It's centralized in the same way plastic manufacturing companies have advantages in making shovels. The point is the economics are what provokes the decentralizing force, not "hash power" or mining.
If you get the economics right then you get an acceptable balance between security and performance. Mining itself is supposed to provide security and keep the network going but it's not by itself enough to promote decentralization. The entire incentive structure promotes decentralization or centralization according to the merits of it's game theoretical basis.
I get your point and I don't agree. Still I find it hard to believe that you want to trust these guys to get the economics right. Did you watch the full video (not only the Craig Wright part)? The points they are making make sense only coming miner's community mouths because they are in the fee market and they want what's the most profitable for them. And history is showing us that it's not the best thing for Bitcoin in the most cases.
I think of it like this, the secure information system has any security at all based not on how much hashing power but based primarily on the incentive structure. It's a game theory problem, not a technical (hashing power) problem, and because the problem is framed as some sort of technical problem, people seem to think that making the mining rigs cheaper is somehow going to change the security.
Based on what game theory?
Which problem you are talking about? You think that there is a security issue?
And mining rigs are becoming cheaper as the is technology evolving. How much hash per $100 you can get now compared to 3 years ago?
My point is if you want security to be in the amount of people who participate then you're moving security to the edges. The truth is, if you have good economic incentives then the behavior of the participants will at least in theory conform to protect the security of the network because it will be in their best interest to do it.
Mining isn't really going to ever be decentralized on the level of everyone being a miner is my point. That is a false possibility in the first place. I'm not sure anyone seriously believes grandma will be mining Bitcoins on her smart phone along with billions of people in developing countries. We have to at least be realistic about what is likely to happen and that future is extremely unlikely.
In my opinion the security of Bitcoin is based on the structure of economic incentives, not the amount of hash power miners generate or how many miners there are. You can have security with Proof of Stake greater than Bitcoin no matter what the hashrate of Bitcoin if the Proof of Stake has a better incentive structure.